hiroshi who?

Take the down-home appeal of Tom Brokaw, the earnest look of Dan Rather, and the magnetism of Peter Jennings. Mix in some Rush Limbaugh, a soup�on of Julia Child, and a dash of Pat Sajak. Blend and ship to Japan. Meet Hiroshi Kume.

While his name means nothing to American TV viewers, Kume is one of the most-watched news anchors in the world. Each weeknight he draws a 20 percent share of the audience to his eighty-minute program on TV Asahi (more than any of the American news anchors), according to Video Research Ltd. of Tokyo. In a country of 125 million where television saturation is nearly 100 percent, Kume has a powerful voice for someone whose TV career began in the kitchen as a cooking show host and flourished as the emcee of music and variety shows.

Kume free- ly admits that since he knew none of the rules of journalism in 1985 when he took his first and only journalism job, he broke them with impunity. Before Kume recreated the role of newscasters in Japan, news shows were the bastion of the boring. Tradition required each program to have one dreary but respected older gentleman in a dark suit sitting slightly in front of a demure female, whose job was mainly to smile, bow politely, and read some light society stories. Occasionally, she got to read the weather.

Kume roared onto the airwaves with a very different style. His clothing was hip; his delivery rapid-fire. He gesticulated to the camera to underscore a point, he brought on props -- exploding volcanoes to help describe natural disasters or life-size mannequins of Mikhail Gorbachev to introduce the Soviet leader to his audience. He grimaced at political corruption and he laughed out loud. "Re-porting things impartially, or from a neutral point of view, is just impossible," Kume told an interviewer in 1991. "You can appear to be neutral, but it is not possible to really be so."

Kume's own feelings, thoughts, biases, and quirks fill "News Station," his nightly broadcast. In 1989, when his favorite baseball team, the underdog Hiroshima Carp, was matched against the powerhouse Yomiuri Giants for Japan's Central League pennant, Kume said he would shave his head if the Giants won. He appeared with a crew cut the night after the game.

"I do not see where there's anything fundamentally wrong with cracking a joke in a newscast," Kume said soon afterwards. "If we can be talking about the tragic loss of life in a volcanic eruption in one breath and switch in the next breath to a commercial for cockroach traps, what kind of intrinsic decorum does television really have, anyhow?"

But Kume prides himself on being only part fluff. He gets serious when he says his job is to "protect the people from the government." And when he decides to put on his public advocacy hat, even the most powerful politicians in Japan run for cover. One night, when he was charting the flow of millions of dollars from a scandal-ridden construction company into coffers of the LDP, then Japan's most powerful political party, and other senior politicians, Kume looked into the camera and said, "Hard to believe they run the country this way, isn't it?"

In October 1992, Kume focused his attack on the most powerful man in the murky world of Japanese politics, Shin Kanemaru. The shadowy political figure once held the position of deputy prime minister, but his real power was as a political dealmaker. Kume began an on-air campaign to oust Kanemaru from office after Kanemaru admitted taking $4 million in illegal campaign contributions from a mob-linked trucking company. He raised its dramatic content one night when he announced to his millions of viewers "I might be killed" because "gangsters are involved" in the Kanemaru scandal. Like many of Kume's antics, the announcement was part theatrics and part truth. Viewers remembered how the respected filmmaker Juzo Itami had been knifed across the face in May 1992 by attackers after his anti-gangster movie Mimbo No Onna was released.

But Kume did not back off. One night he mimicked politicians stuffing cash in their pockets. He reported on local assemblies across the country that condemned Kanemaru. Kume's on-air campaign was not the only reason, but Kanemaru did resign his seat in disgrace.

Kume does not limit his barbs to domestic events. Last year, he offended the military junta in Burma by refusing to call the country by the name they have chosen, Myanmar, and referring to it as "that country" or "the country west of Thailand." Kume says he refuses to use the name Myanmar because it was created by the military government.

In January, the influential French weekly, Le Nouvel Observateur, called Kume one of the world's fifty most influential people, citing the reverberations his style of newscasting has had on Japan. His ability to connect with the vast numbers of Japan's middle class has given him control of Japa- nese television at night. In that way, he walks the same path as his American night-time hero, David Letterman.

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